What do the “FIFA World Cup” and Gaza attack have in common? They are both currently being used as social engineering ploys by a couple of malware campaigns seen on Twitter. TrendLabsSM senior threat researcher Ivan Macalintal spotted several malicious programs being distributed via the popular microblogging site. These malware campaigns take advantage of noteworthy events to lure users into clicking malicious links in Tweets.

Clicking the link leads users to download a copy of a backdoor detected as BKDR_BIFROSE.SMK, which connects to IP addresses that allow a remote user to perform malicious activities on affected systems. These activities include sending and receiving files, keylogging, and retrieving user names and passwords. It also has rootkit capabilities, which enable it to hide its processes and files from its victims.

The second campaign, on the other hand, sends out the following Tweet related to the Gaza attacks:

This time, the malware that is downloaded from the link is BKDR_BIFROSE.PAB, which opens a hidden Internet Explorer (IE) window and opens TCP port 788 to listen for commands from a remote malicious user who may initiate a denial-of-service (DoS) attack to target systems using specific flooding methods.